by Jack Mars
He indicated a point inside Iran. The map zoomed in and Luke could see the curve of a road.
“You make your way by morning to this rendezvous point, where a truck with one of our people will take you into Tehran. He will take you to see a person in Tehran, a double agent we have been working with. We believe this person is reliable, and may know the location of the warheads.”
“Sounds a little iffy,” Ed said.
Shavitz shrugged. “There are people in our government who believe this operation is a waste of time. How would you say it? It’s like searching for a needle in a haystack. Nevertheless…”
Luke stood and walked over to the map. He put his finger on the border region on the screen. Touching it made it zoom in even further, showing a topographical map and indicating high mountains. “Both Ed and I have been inside Iran, but neither one of us has been in this area. We don’t know this terrain. The odds of us dropping in at night, getting our bearings, and then walking overland to that rendezvous point before daylight…”
Shavitz nodded. “That’s why you’re going to drop in with one of our best men as your guide. He has traversed that region numerous times.”
Ed shook his head. “People die when they ride with us. You should know that upfront. This looks pretty dicey. Don’t send anyone you can’t afford to lose.”
“You should do a better job protecting your people,” the young guy with blond hair said.
Ed turned and looked at him. “That’s not what we’re there for. We move fast, and we hit hard. Hard, you dig? People sign on, they need to keep up. And they need to keep their heads down.”
The young guy looked at Shavitz. “How can this man infiltrate Iran? A giant, hard-hitting black man with an American accent? Who is going to believe this? He is like a character from Sunday morning cartoons.”
“There are black Persians, of course,” Shavitz said. “Descendents of slaves from many generations ago. And there are descendents of more recent nomadic Muslim tribes from Africa. A black man can pass in Iran.”
The kid looked at Ed. “Do you even speak a word of Farsi?”
Ed shrugged. He stared back at the kid. “Bibito gaeidam,” he said in perfect Farsi, no American accent at all.
The kid scowled. “Madar ghende.”
Now Ed smiled. “Kir to kunet. If you don’t shut your mouth.”
Luke looked at Swann and Trudy, who were watching the exchange in bafflement. Luke shook his head and smiled. “You don’t even want to know what they’re saying.”
The kid rose from his chair. He was tall and slim. His body seemed to vibrate with electricity. “I’ll wash your mouth out with soap.”
Ed didn’t budge. He just shook his head. “You don’t want to dance with me, little man.”
“I also don’t want to take you into Iran.”
Luke turned to Shavitz. “You’ve got to be kidding me. This guy?”
Shavitz nodded. “Agent Stone and Agent Newsam, meet Agent Ari Meil of Mossad. Former captain with the Sayeret Matkal. Infiltration and intelligence-gathering are two of his many skills. He is among the best we have. If his work weren’t so secret, he would be a national hero.”
Shavitz paused. “He can get you in there. And he can get you back out again alive.”
Luke stared at the kid. The kid stared back, eyes fierce.
“The question is,” Ed said, “if we have to listen to this guy run his mouth for two straight days, will we even want to go on living?”
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
9:45 a.m. Israel Time (2:45 a.m. Eastern Standard Time)
Tel Aviv, Israel
“Sayeret Matkal,” Trudy Wellington said.
They were all sitting in Luke’s hotel suite at the Hilton. The room was on the fifteenth floor, and the balcony had a panoramic view of the Mediterranean Sea. The accommodations were good. The bed was king-sized and comfortable. Within minutes of entering the room, Swann had found a listening device inside one of the table lamps. Luke was sure there were others.
“Watching me, watching you,” Swann had said, before reassembling the lamp.
Luke shrugged. It didn’t matter. Who was the enemy around here, anyway?
They had ordered up some room service, and once again the food was okay—hotel food, sort of Israeli, sort of American, sort of nothing at all. Ed had eaten four eggs, potatoes, and a quarter-pound cut of steak. It wasn’t on the menu—he just asked them if they had it, and they said yes.
Watching Ed put food away was like watching an ice shelf calve away from Antarctica. It was like watching a giant tornado demolish a trailer park in Oklahoma. It was like watching a killer whale chow down on a group of baby seals. It was a force of nature, a thing unto itself.
Luke sighed. The jump wasn’t until late tonight. True, it was from Iraq, but they probably wouldn’t even leave here until this afternoon at the earliest. And he was tired. It was time to get some sleep.
“Sayeret Matkal,” Trudy said again. She was holding her tablet, waiting for their attention.
“Yes, please enthrall us,” Swann said.
“It’s the special forces unit of the Israeli Defense Forces. Primarily an intelligence-gathering unit, conducting deep reconnaissance behind enemy lines, and modeled after the British Army’s Special Air Service. This is right down to the SAS’s motto, ‘Who Dares, Wins.’”
“Nice,” Ed said. “I’ve always liked that one.”
“No need to make up your own if there’s already a good one you can take off the shelf,” Swann said.
“The unit is also roughly analogous to the United States Army’s Delta Force.”
Ed made a mock gasp. Both he and Luke had come through Delta Force. Luke pictured the vetting process he had gone through to join Delta. He pictured the training he had gone through after he was accepted. Brutal. Absolutely brutal. If the kid had done anything like that, he couldn’t be all bad. And he was younger, much closer to those days than either Ed or Luke.
“Members are chosen from the IDF, and they are the best soldiers physically, intellectually, and psychologically that the IDF has to offer. The selection process is called Gibbush, and is notorious for putting soldiers through several days with no sleep, over a course that is physically and mentally grueling.”
“Okay,” Luke said. “It sounds like something Ed and I are familiar with. If the kid could be a little less… himself, let’s say, we can find a way to mesh with him. They probably gave him to us because he’s good. Because he has Iran experience. Because he’s cool under fire. Because they expect us to run into some hotspots, and he has combat experience.”
“Or for some other reason that they’re not sharing,” Swann said. “Turns out they didn’t even tell us his name.”
Trudy smiled. “Swann’s been doing oppositional research.”
“Tell me,” Luke said.
Swann took his laptop off the table. He glanced at the ceiling light and looked at Luke.
“It’s okay,” Luke said. “We know they’re listening. And they know that we know. There are no secrets between friends.”
Swann shrugged. “Ari Meil,” he said. “Born twenty-nine years ago in the Jewish Quarter of East Jerusalem. His father was a Syrian Jew who emigrated to Israel in the 1960s. He owns an electronics store in Jerusalem to this day. His mother was the daughter of Dutch Jews who survived World War Two hidden in basements and attics by members of the Dutch Resistance. She is a midwife.
“Meil was an honor student and standout basketball player in high school, and joined the IDF just after his eighteenth birthday. He was recruited into Sayeret Matkal at nineteen. Married his high school sweetheart, an Israeli Arab—interesting—and had two children. During the 2014 Israel-Gaza conflict, Captain Ari Meil led a group of commandos on a helicopter drop to kidnap two high-ranking members of Hamas. The intelligence was wrong, or it was a trap—there was no Hamas meeting at the site, and the building was wired to explode. Four members of the infiltration team died, including Captain M
eil, who was crushed under a collapsing cinderblock wall.”
Luke rubbed his face and yawned. “Are there any other Ari Meils in the phone book? Maybe our Ari isn’t really dead.”
Swann nodded. “Yeah. There’s a guy who runs a fruit and vegetable stand in Ramla. He’s sixty-three years old. There’s also a guy who does wedding photography. He’s based out of Nazareth, but he’s willing to travel pretty much anywhere, from Haifa in the north to as far south as Beersheba. Sound like your man?”
“Sounds like my man is a ghost,” Luke said.
Just then, his satellite phone, which was sitting on the end table, began to ring. It was a friendly-looking phone, white with big orange buttons, and its ring was a neutral hum. Even so, the phone made him jump just a little.
He glanced at the number.
“Guys, I need to take this,” he said.
“Is it your girlfriend?” Ed said.
Luke shook his head. “It’s your boss.”
The three of them stood to leave.
“Stone,” he said into the handset.
A deep male voice came on the line. “Hold for the President of the United States.”
Trudy went out and shut the door behind her. Luke glanced around the room, at all the places Israeli listening devices, and tiny video monitors, could be hiding. This was going to be awkward.
Her voice came on. “Luke?”
“Madam President,” he said, and headed for the door to the balcony. Hopefully it was windy out there.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
12:15 p.m. Israel Time (5:15 a.m. Eastern Standard Time)
The Western Wall
The Old City, East Jerusalem
She was afraid.
Her name was Miryam, though no one here knew that. These were her last moments alive. No one knew that, either.
Her body trembled as she passed shoulder to shoulder with the other women beneath the stone archway of the ancient Dung Gate. The procession made its way through the Old City of Jerusalem, many marchers—young women, old women, and girls—who were coming to the Western Wall to pray for an end to the fighting, and the safe return of Daria Shalit. The narrow streets were crowded—packed—and despite the chill in the air, she felt flushed and hot. She felt like she might pass out.
L’vado y’imlokh nora, the women sang. Their breath rose in white plumes.
(In majesty He still shall reign)
V’hu hayah v’hu hoveh
(And He was, and He is)
Miryam knew all these words by heart.
The air was full of noise—the singing of the women, the screaming and shouting of the others. The Orthodox men and boys did not want them there. They pressed in on all sides, white shirts, black hats, beards—held back by Israeli police in blue uniforms. There were pitched battles to reach the women.
But still they sang:
V’hu yih’yeh b’tif’arah
(And He will be in glory)
Miryam had been through this many times. Previously, it had seemed like a charade, a stage play acted out, live, on the streets. The men didn’t really want to attack the women—they just wanted to shout their displeasure, and feel, afterward, that they had done something. The police didn’t really try that hard to hold them back.
But today was different.
As Miryam watched, up ahead, two young men broke through the lines. One was dragged down by police almost instantly. The other grabbed at an older woman, tearing away her prayer shawl—her tallit—and pulling her to the ground.
“Oh my God,” Miryam whispered under her breath. All her formal prayers were forgotten, so she just talked. No one could possibly hear her, anyway.
“Oh my God, Allah, please accept my sacrifice. Please open your Heavenly gates to me this day, and hold me to your…”
A much older man loomed in front of her. An ancient. He wore thick glasses and a long white beard. The police probably did not tackle him because he was too frail. He raised a long bony finger, like a schoolteacher admonishing a misbehaving student. The other women streamed around him, ignoring him, still singing.
“You will not!” he shouted. “You will not commit this sin on this day! Not this day, the day when the very fate of God’s holy land hangs in the balance! Go home! Go home to your husbands and fathers and renounce this!”
Miryam pulled her tallit close around her as she passed him. She hugged her Torah scrolls. The Orthodox men hated the Women of the Wall, she knew. To the Orthodox Jews, women could not wear the tallit or the tefillin, the small black leather boxes containing scrolls of parchment inscribed with verses from the Torah, or read from the Sefer Torah scroll.
That modern feminist women would dare to do these things, and while standing at the Western Wall of the Temple, was more than an affront, more than an offense. It was a sin. It was a threat. It was to tear at the fabric of everything these men knew to be true.
“You will beg before too long!” the old man screamed behind her. “You will beg His forgiveness!”
But this was not Miryam’s fight. She was not a Jew, after all.
She was a Palestinian. She had been born in Gaza seventeen years ago, and had grown up in the rubble of streets and buildings that had been bombed, and partially rebuilt, and then bombed again. She had grown up in a city with electricity three hours a day. She had lived in an apartment on the fifth floor, where every day, men carried two buckets of water up the stairs to meet her family’s needs for the day.
Three years ago, her ten-year-old brother Hashan had been shot down while throwing bottle bombs at an Israeli tank. She had died inside that day. Last year, her lover Yasser had been blown apart while attempting a rocket attack on an Israeli helicopter. Whatever little thing that still lived within her, whatever tiny flame that flickered, went out. There was no hope. There was no reason to continue this life.
She would give what remained of herself to Allah. She would die in jihad.
She had prayed for almost a year, that her sacrifice would be acceptable to Him. She had prayed that when she died, she would do so surrounded by the ruined corpses of her enemies.
The procession passed through the police checkpoint now, at the entrance to the great plaza that opened before the Western Wall. Thousands of people were here—too many to count. Before her, in the crowd, hundreds of blue and white Star of David flags waved. Dozens of people held aloft banners with the smiling face of Daria Shalit.
So many people, so many…
Miryam walked through the metal detector holding her breath, though she knew the bomb sewn inside her garments was made entirely of plastic, and the kitchen matches she would apply to the detonating chemical were made of light wood.
Nothing happened. Her last hope, the last hope of everyone, was that some Israeli policeman would have been suspicious of her as she passed through the checkpoint, or some piece of metal on someone else—a clasp, a buckle—would set off alarms and they would all be pulled aside for further searches.
Why? Why would they search these Jewish women on their way to the Wall?
They wouldn’t.
Miryam felt dizzy, her head starting to spin. She stumbled on an uneven stone, and a firm hand from the woman behind her steadied her.
“Careful, my girl,” the woman said. “Stand tall. Be proud. Reject their shouts and their catcalls. This is the work that God calls us to do.”
They had been so kind to her! These Women of the Wall were so kind. They were so beautiful. They thought she was a young Sephardic Jew from Greece named Helena, who was alone in Israel. She had infiltrated their ranks six months ago, and they had accepted her and loved her as one of their own. They had clothed her and fed her. She had sung with them and danced with them, and prayed with them. They had children, they had men in their lives, they had work. They were committed to this path. And she had become one of them.
Sometimes, she could almost convince herself…
But no. She was not a Jew. The Jews had killed her brother, and the man
she would have married, and loved.
She almost screamed then.
“Why? Why weren’t you kind before? Why did your tank kill Hashan?”
The tank… Oh my God, the tanks were so big.
She couldn’t breathe.
These beautiful women, who had been so kind, so gentle. The screaming men, surging around them again, held back by the police. Throngs of people—people from all walks of life, filling this plaza.
The Wall loomed up ahead. It was gigantic, reaching to the sky, the large, ageless stones dwarfing the people that swarmed in front of them. The women were never going to make it to the Wall—there were too many people between here and there.
They were jostled again, the crowd pushing and shoving. Miryam tripped and fell to the ground. Others stumbled over her, on top of her. The Orthodox men had broken through the police line. A chain reaction happened, and dozens of people fell. Women, men, police, all falling into a twisting, thrashing pile.
Now. Do it now.
Now was as good a time as any, before she was crushed to death.
She dropped her Torah scroll, reached down to her pants, and ripped the light material of her clothes, pulling out the plastic canister.
It was a clever device—about the size of a small flashlight, with two interior chambers. The larger chamber was packed with more than three hundred grams of one of the most powerful explosives known to man—a highly stable compound that could not be ignited by a mere open flame. In the smaller chamber were fifty grams of a lesser chemical, often called Mother of Satan. Mother of Satan was very unstable—stray sparks or lit cigarettes often caused firestorms in the kitchens of the men who worked with it.
A tiny wick extended from the device. A small flame would ignite the Mother of Satan. The Mother of Satan would detonate, igniting the more powerful chemical, setting off the reaction that would make a very large explosion. These were the things that had been explained to her.